About Me

Hi, I’m Alex.

I build communities, started one of the longest running coworking communities in the world, write a crapload of words every day, tweet a little too much, coach people to be the best version of themselves possible, can't stop learning new things, and do my very best not to take myself too seriously.

I have one goal: to fill the world with truly excellent collaborators so we can all work together, better.

Because let's be honest...most of us aren't very good at it.

Start here

These are my most popular and most valuable pieces, to help you get started.

I think this is poingant for a number of reasons – not the least of which is that it fits my own mental model for coworking so well. Coworking works because it throws away so many of the bad habits we’ve learned and puts the focus back on the people again.

Collaboration isn’t something you do, it’s the biproduct of being a better collaborator.

Trust & High Contact

In my essay on Community as a coworking core value, I mentioned communities of trust. Coworking spaces allow for there to be a focus on the formation of trust and deeper relationships between coworkers, because office politics, hierarchies, and succession planning are removed from the equation.

Going one step further, coworking creates opportunities for people to interact in a “high contact” environment. The serendipitous nature of a coworking space means that people are often spending far more face time with each other than in an office where people only interact when they need to.

Learning by Example

Coworking spaces are great places to learn how to be a better collaborator. The founders of the best coworking spaces tend to look to their members as collaborators more than customers – an important model in Indy Hall’s success. The members who work together – not just with each other but with the space itself – tend to have the deepest bond with the community. New members see this as something they want and can have for themselves, and along the way not only learn how to model good collaborator behaviors from other members but become new models themselves.

Learning to Ride a Bike

Learning to ride a bike alone is a painful series of trials and errors. While you might’ve watched somebody else do it, you’re likely to fall and scrape your knee on your first try. Teaching somebody to ride a bike, however, requires them to be a good collaborator more than it requires them to be a good teacher. They need to guide you, support you, and help you find your own “balance”. It requires that the new rider trusts their instructor/collaborator, and spend a fair amount of time together.

The collaborators that work in coworking spaces are very similar. Good collaborators earn trust first. They spend a lot of face time together with their peers. They don’t instruct, but instead guide, support, and help you find your own way.

In the best collaborator relationships, it’s a two way street – each person has the ability to provide that experience for the other at some point in their time together.

Coworking provides one of the best natural environments for this to happen.

I think community is my personal favorite of the coworking core values, and perhaps one of the most misunderstood or most often taken for granted.

It’s easy to make mistakes around the idea of community. Experts in the field of sociology can’t even agree on a definition, Wikipedia mentions that by the 1950’s there were nearly 100 “discrete definitions”.

It’s the people.

In the context of coworking, though, I believe that a focus on community means putting emphasis on the people, their interactions, and the relationships that form above everything else. At Indy Hall, every decision we make considers members and their opportunities to interact with one another.

We > Me

We organize events that encourage people to explore each others interests in and outside of work. Show and Tell, Lunch & Learns, and Happy Hours provide a spectrum of formal and informal opportunities to step away from the desk and get to know a coworker.

We share rituals and experiences that allow new members to join the tribe and develop camaraderie.

We broadcast our favorite places to hang out outside of our coworking space so that people can easily gather on their own.

We attend and support other events and initiatives together, both enhancing them with the sense of “togetherness” but also showing the uninitiated that the “togetherness” is accessible to them.

We learn, share, grow, play, experiment, celebrate together. We commiserate and console each other as well.

The coworking space is a tool

A coworking space is just that – a space. It’s not a community until it has people in it.

Geoff and I wrote about Coworking as a “clubhouse”, and I think that language is more accurate of a description than “office” for most of the best coworking spaces in the world. But it’s important to remember that in order for a clubhouse to be useful, a club – a community – should be in need of a home.

This is why I stress the “community first” not just as a mental model (as in, “consider the community first”), but as an order of of operations. Can a community form because a coworking space exists? Absolutely. But it takes time, and therefore a financial runway for what might be an undeterminable amount of time.

You don’t own a community, you belong to a community.

Its that very natural sense of belonging that I think drives people to coworking spaces more than anything else. But I think that as a coworking space owner, it’s important to remember that you’re not the coworking community owner.

I think the best relationship for a coworking space owner to have is to belong to the community that inhabits the space. That connection is authentic, and therefore breeds more authentic relationships in the space. You don’t necessarily need to be a leader in that community, but you should be prepared to be an active member of that community.

I was actually remarking to my friend this morning that I absolutely love that I can come to Indy Hall as a member, far more than I care about coming to Indy Hall as an owner. The oft-forgotten truth is that coworking space owners can get the same benefits from coworking as the members do, mostly due to the fact that they themselves are (or should be) members.

Communities of Trust

People in proximity is a good first step towards community, but as I’ve said community doesn’t really happen until people are interacting. We’ve found that relationship formation is the primary event that transitions a group of people towards being a “community”.

If relationships between coworking members are like tendons, then trust is the the muscle that makes a coworking community strong and healthy.

We start by trusting our members, and knowing that sets a stage where trust is a valued part of being a part of the community. When you start the relationship with coworking members off on one where you don’t trust them, you can’t ever expect them to trust you, either.

No two communities are identical

Indy Hall’s original tagline was “this is how Philadelphia does coworking”, and we remain true and honest to that statement. We didn’t stick a CitizenSpace clone in Philly, we looked around and took the time to understand the communities that already existed, what those people were like, and how a Philly-flavored coworking space would work.

I wouldn’t ever encourage somebody to replicate Indy Hall, nor do I think it’s really replicate-able. Instead, I urge people to learn from the lessons we’ve learned, share some of our ideas, but interpret them to fit their community .

I personally think that the coolest thing is that communities, like the people in them, have personality. Squelching that personality is a waste – instead, embrace it. Own it. Live it. You’ll love it.

Coworking, much like its sister movement of Barcamp, was given birth to by a group of advocates of open source methodologies. Their ideas of openness are the reason that Barcamp and Coworking are the core reasons that the two movements exist in the first place, so without this core value, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here writing these essays, and I certainly wouldn’t have the global community of coworking participants to call my comrads.

Openness is unfortunately one of those words that’s become somewhat geriatric, losing its teeth and forgetting what it means . . . There’s the Facebook “Openness” and Adobe “Openness” and Government “Openness” and they all mean different things.
When I think of openness, I think of “freedom”, “forkability”, and “interoperability.” Regardless of the definition of “open” or “openness” that you use — yes, you must always fight for openness, and you must always fight for decisions to be made that are more transparent, more expansive, more liberal, and more inclusive. This should be the case for both moral and economic reasons.
When I think of openness I also think of biology and the human body. The human body is an “open system” and thrives because of its openness. The human body is constantly exchanging things it values little for things it values more. Whether you’re talking about oxygen and CO2 or nutrients and waste, the body cycles – value in and waste excreted.
It requires openness to live.

The fact that Chris and early coworking founders realized that by making coworking “open”, that it could evolve into something much larger than any one of them could control – and that would ultimately be the best thing for the idea.

Freedom

Coworking as a movement embodies freedom and independence. It represents choice, the ultimate freedom. Coworking Seattle’s about page says…

Coworking is about making the personal choice to work along side other people instead of in isolation.

Forkability

This idea is important on two levels.

“Forkability” is the ability to take the “source”, of one project and use it to begin a new project. In software, the source is code. In coworking and other non-software applications, the source is lessons learned, ideas executed, and core values.

Coworking has become a global phenomenon because the idea was “forkable”. The early founders made their lessons, ideas, and values available to people like myself to build our own versions on top of. And in turn, we created even more possibilities for newcomers to the movement.

On a local level, forkability means that the members of a coworking space should be able to make it what they want it to be, within bounds of reason.

I’ve described Indy Hall as a “blank canvas” an office. That is, what happens when you provide basic office amenities only – desks, chairs, power, internet, meeting rooms, bathrooms – and let the people who inhabit that office decide what’s most important to them? Giving them an opportunity to make it their own.

The stories I tell of the cool things that happened at Indy Hall aren’t things that Geoff or I went out of our way to make happen. The stories I tell of the cool things that happened at Indy Hall are all stories of other people, our members, who built on top of the most basic infrastructure we could provide.

What’s particularly cool about coworking is that it gives people the chance to create new solutions to the problems they have, rather than relying on the old solutions that haven’t been working as well.

Our members know that we are open to them forking Indy Hall, especially when the things they decide to do benefit other members in addition to themselves.

Interoperability

And most importantly, we contributed back to the origin of our fork whenever possible. That’s the primary motivation I have for sharing as much as I do on this blog as well as on the Coworking Google Group. I’ve learned so much from others, and want to give that back.

With all of the coworking “forks” running around in the wild today, how do we share back, keeping the ecosystem alive and healthy?

I think that the understanding and being committed to of these core values – Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability – are the key to maintaining interoperability between forked coworking initiatives.

Common core values provide common ground for discussion and understanding. Being able to bring together those disparate opinions and ideas are going to be increasingly necessary as we learn more beyond where people work, and continue to explore how people work and why people work.

They’ll select themselves in.

One of the unique elements of coworking is that anybody who can work from anywhere can do it. You don’t even need a special coworking space to do it. You can cowork in a living room, or a park, or even somebody else’s office. But the key element here is self-selection.

If you think about it, it’s actually pretty remarkable. A coworking space is one of the only places in the world where every single person in the room is there because they chose to be. An environment composed of willing self-selected participants is a remarkably positive and productive place to work, as you’ll find out talking to anybody who coworks. I think that many people who cite unusual productivity levels from working at a coworking space are actually feeling the benefits of a) choosing for themselves where to work for the day and b) being surrounded by others who choose where they work for the day.

The key to this interaction even being possible, though, is that the coworking space allows the members and participants to self select themselves in.

An application process, is the “baby with the bathwater” scenario for this problem. While an application process may keep people out, or keep things “balanced”, you are also likely to be keeping out people that you don’t intend to because you hadn’t considered them viable members.

Over the last 4 years, we’ve had many people surprise us. Maybe their experience level seemed lower than average. Maybe their social skills needed a little work. Maybe they were shyer. Maybe they were boisterous. Maybe they were snarky. Maybe they were know-it alls. In time, most of those attributes vanished. They started to be themselves, instead of the person they thought they had to be. And in the best cases, they improved themselves over time. When you have the vantage point of watching somebody progress their personal and professional skills over the course of a few years, you’ll surprised how much people can grow. If you let them.

Coworking as a melting pot allows all of these extremes to normalize on their own. It trusts that when people have to actually deal with other people instead of have managers, mediators, or human resources solve their problems for them – most of the time, things work themselves out.

They’ll select themselves out.

In the early days of Indy Hall, we were excited to be meeting anybody who wanted to be around. Not because we were desperate to fill our office, but because we were genuinely excited to be finding more and more people who were awesome.

Then one day, somebody not so awesome showed up. I knew personal stories about this person, and decided that I didn’t want that person around Indy Hall. I talked it over with Geoff, who was able to look at the situation without my biases.

“If we don’t let in one person because you don’t like them, what kind of precedent does that set for everybody else? We want Indy Hall to be a place where anybody – even people we don’t know yet – can feel welcome, be a part of and contribute to something great.”

My commitment to the core value of accessibility was being challenged.

I had to trust that this person would make the right decision for themselves: either they would change their behavior from what I knew to have happened in the past (a positive outcome), or that they’d leave on their own when they realized they wouldn’t get what they wanted (also a positive outcome).

If they were truly not aligned with our community as I expected, the latter was the most likely result.

Inside of a couple of months, that person simply stopped showing up on their own.

This interaction has happened more than once. On only two occasions in four years have we had to ask somebody to leave.

You need both.

The core value of accessibility relies on both of these dynamics to be in balance. When a coworking space’s philosophy remains committed to this core value, the remarkable outcomes and benefits that make coworking more than a trendy way to share real estate start to take form.

When everything shakes out, you’ll be glad you created a unique environment where you can trust people to surprise you in a positive way.

As a reminder, the coworking community rallied and bought coworking.com so that we’d have a place that tied the word “coworking” to the core values of coworking. These values originated with CitizenSpace, and have been interpreted by dozens of coworking spaces around the world.

I’m noticing that coworking core values aren’t even on the radar of most of the newest coworking spaces opening around the world, so I’m hoping that by taking some time to riff on each one, they might get some visibility and be considered an important element to keeping the movement alive as more than a trend.

This first post focuses on the value of sustainability. Sustainability is a loaded word, with lots of connotations.

The most obvious are the “green” effects of coworking. Resource sharing is inherently green, as is commute reduction. While I consider these elements relatively superficial, that’s not to downplay their importance. But the reality is that, in a modern society, does “being a responsible eco-citizen” belong in the list of top line core values? Efficiency is a benefit, but not a core value. Striving for efficiency is a good goal, but it’s not a core value.

That is to say: if you’re NOT considering the environment you inhabit, the other effects and values really don’t matter that much.

So if sustainability doesn’t mean “going green”, what does it mean?

Sustainability, in my mind, is about making sure that whatever you’re doing can be done for as long as it needs to be done. In less vague terms: are you building your community, your coworking space, your infrastructure, and your business models in a way that they aren’t dependent on outside resources to persist, to grow, and to flourish.

In the early days of Indy Hall, Geoff and I were talking about how to take the momentum we’d built and turn it into the coworking space that everybody wanted. One of the important insights Geoff drove home was to make sure that we’d be able to sustain ourselves – our membership should be able to cover our costs as well as provide room for growth – or else it wasn’t worth building the infrastructure to help that community grow.

We looked at for profit and non-profit models, and determined that in order for us to persist, for us to be sustainable, being a for-profit business provided for us most efficiently. We could stay lightweight and agile, but still remain benevolent and community focused. Most importantly, we would grow in a way that was dependent on no one except for the people who benefitted from the resources we could rally.

This is a perfect balance for us, and continues to be as we’ve grown over nearly 4 years.

As long as they need us, we’re sustainable and independent. When they no longer need us as we exist today, we’ve either already morphed into what they need, or the business ends. And that’s okay.

Joel’s tweet above is about food. But if you read past the fact that he’s talking about food, what he’s really talking about is nourishment.

A community that isn’t able to nourish itself lives in dependency of whomever is providing for it, and therefore is not only not free, but not sustainable.

The end of life is dependent on the source more than on the needs of the community.

Conversely, a community that is able to provide for itself doesn’t exclude itself from external sources of nourishment – but it is free, sustainable, and independent.

The people and businesses we support will live as our reflections

I firmly believe that the longer a coworking space is able to do what it does best, the healthier the people and businesses who work from it will be.

Less than one week ago, an unlikely e-mail found it’s way into my inbox. Actually, it found it’s way into 2300+ inboxes connected to the Coworking Google Group, which arguably the most active singular location to find out about coworking, share ideas about coworking, and meet people interested in coworking.

Gerrit Visser, and his partner Bernie DeKoven, had owned coworking.com for over a decade. On it, they shared articles and ideas about collaborative work and play. They periodically interacted with members of the coworking community, including some interviews with Brad Neuberg who kicked off the movement we know coworking as today.

An Opportunity

Gerrit and Bernie had been approached by two commercial entities interested in coworking.com, and decided between them that the community that had gotten behind the term “coworking” should have a shot at buying the domain first, if they were going to sell at all.

A few hours after their post the Google group with the offer, there hadn’t been any public activity so I decided to take some action and e-mail Gerrit for details.

Once I had the sale price and a target to hit, I realized that there wasn’t only no way for me to buy this domain on my own without seriously stressing my bank account, but it would have been the wrong thing to do. Indy Hall benefits from a strong sense of belonging and ownership even from people who do not technically own IndyHall. It’s peoples’ contributions to the making of Indy Hall in every step of our history that binds them to us, and to each other.

Photo by @missrogue

People support what they help create

I e-mailed a list of trusted advisors, peers, and a couple of coworking’s “patron saints” to first see if I was off my rocker, but also to propose a model for raising the funds. That model established a clear cut financial goal, defined methods of contribution, and outlined some simple rewards.

Three basic tiers of contribution, and actionable goals.

Before I could even get the model out of the hands of this short list, almost half of the target had been reached. The concept had been de-risked.

The floodgates open

At 12:26 pm EST on Monday February 15th (my dad’s birthday), I posted a proposition to the google group based on the one that had happened in the smaller dialogue. 5 hours later, I had to put a hold on contributions because we’d actually OVERSHOT our target by a few thousand dollars. Money poured in from around the world.

Quickly, discussion on the Google group changed from excitement to excitement…with a bit of anxiety.

Woah. That went fast. Too fast?

In the hurry, I’d created a sponsorship model that was exclusionary, unless we were to raise funds without any limits. If we went that route, we’d need someone to be responsible for that extra money, and what its spent on. Talk of business entities resulted, co-ops, LLCs, and the like. The pendulum swung between highly inclusionary and highly exclusionary.

Nearly 100 emails were slung over the next 2 days, debating a number of ideas and issues. Among them, three primary ideas/questions began to crystalize.

How to pay for/who owns the domain, long term

What kind of entity could exist

The definition of coworking

The idea of a coworking “entity” or “organization” seems like the right medicine, but I remained unconvinced that we weren’t curing a symptom instead of a disease.

Back to core values

We’ve approached the “what is coworking” conversation before, and at this scale, it’s EXTREMELY difficult to pin down an answer of what is and what isn’t. Instead, we have core values established by Citizen Space in 2006 and adopted and iterated by many other spaces and communities. Those core values are clear and understood, and most importantly, something we can expect people to respect.

I might argue that defining coworking doesn’t help anyone long term, because if the definition isn’t allowed to change, we’re stomping out the fire we intentionally created. That’d be counter to the movement. That’d be counter to the purpose. That’d be outright stupid.

But without arguing the “what” and the “who”, we can come back to the domain coworking.com, and what it represents.

Power of Words

The beautiful thing about the internet is it’s made up of words. Domain names are technically pointers to ideas, and instead of having to remember IP addresses, DNS has allowed us to connect words with ideas.

Coworking.com connected the word “coworking” with the ideas…and the ideals…of the community, without introducing commercial and organizational overhead.

Meanwhile, the discussion (and periodic disagreement) on the Google group continued in a healthy, smart, and fun manner. It was helping people bond, and figure each other out. The armchair psychologist and sociologist in me was grinning as I watched the whole thing unfold. The word coworking truly bring people together in fantastic ways at every turn. How could someone not get excited about this?

Launch

While the community continued to converse, sharing ideas, and inching towards something truly emergent, I continued working with Bernie and Gerrit on the domain transaction. It’s worth noting that THEY were every ounce of awesome to do a deal with. Their commitment to the idea of coworking was genuine, and their continued excitement about the domain being put to this use was clear in every e-mail. Almost 80 messages between the three of us over the course of a couple of days, keeping each other updated at every turn. Not the most efficient deal by any means, but they were responsive, fun, and most importantly: I think they handled things very fairly.

Today, I worked with their technical guy Jasper to transfer the domain and complete the transactions. While waiting for DNS to resolve, I drafted the home page that I described in the initial proposition to the group. I built a single page that introduced the coworking core values, and linked to the leading community properties: the google group where this entire legacy will live forever, the wiki which is full of an extensive knowledge base (despite being incredibly disorganized), and the blog (which could stand some refreshing of its own).

Did you know that there is a global community of people dedicated to the values of Collaboration, Openness,Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability in their workplaces?
It’s called Coworking. And people seem to think it’s swell.

Again, connecting the word to the values. The most important thing we can do right now as the movement grows and more people discover the word and the actions associated with it.

Now what?

Now that the site has been relauched, we can return to the questions raised by the admittedly half-baked funding model. I’ve returned the puck into the court of the community, suggesting we focus on brainstorming a way to redistribute the funding opportunity over a wider base, and creating a more sustainable and inclusive model. I have some ideas of my own, and some suggestions from others, but I don’t have an answer yet. My hope is that the ~20 initial funders are willing to re-draw lines so we can all move forward together gracefully. I’m not naive enough to think that money won’t complicate things. But I’m confident that we will find a lightweight and sustainable model to move forward, providing as many people in the community the benefits of the domain as possible.

My hope is that we can re-orient a bit, and as Chris Messina suggested in an offline e-mail, put the focus on the humans instead of the companies that make up this community. I think that will better represent the purpose of the website, and the voices behind it.

There are infinite possibilities with this domain, and that’s very exciting. We’re starting small, and even the small achievement is huge.

Furthermore, we’ve proven that this community can move mountains together. That may be the most exciting demonstration yet.

Thank you.

For this opportunity to lead, learn, inspire, be inspired, and make some history happen.

I’m always “preaching” about finding and having higher purpose in everything you do, especially work. It’s something I learned back in 2006 from Chris Messina and Tara Hunt when they started Citizen Agency…it was a core tenant of what they helped their clients do.

One of my side ventures is as the business manager for Two Guys on Beer. Johnny, Dave, Joe, and I have been producing this show together for almost 2 years now…Joe and I officially on the team for a bit over a year now. We’ve had some really incredible successes under our belt, not the least of which is a syndication on Philly.com’s beer page, participating in Philly Beer Week last year that resulted in interviews with beer legends Sam Calagione and Jim Koch, BeerCamp – a homebrewers summit attended by 200+ homebrew fans, fantastic relationships with a number of breweries & restaurants, and of course over 130 episodes in the bag.

The team works hard for a project that we’ve been slowly…slowly….turning into what we believe can be a profitable venture. We joke that we’re at the point where people send us beer, and that’s awesome…but the real goal is to make money drinking beer. The truth is, we have a higher purpose based on 4 core values that we think will help us make that a reality:

Advocate Beer

Grow the Craft Beer Community

Make Knowledge Available

Build Beer Relationships

Even with these core values, things get tough…especially with a project that is a passion project for the whole team right now. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, “why are we doing this again!?!”.

Then, you get e-mails like this:

TGOB:

You guys are AWESOME! I love experimenting with different beers, but I can’t find good beer while the US Army has me stationed here in Korea. I download your podcasts onto my Zune and watch them as I drink some malty Philipino beers (the only thing decent you can find here), and your show makes me feel like I’m home. Keep the shows coming; you keep me from feeling homesick. You guys rock.

2LT Vandergraff

6-52 AMD, 35th ADA BDE, South Korea

Wow. That’s the kind of thing that really puts things into perspective, and how important having core values can be.

Without our core values, the product that Two Guys on Beer produces wouldn’t be what it is today, and the team probably wouldn’t keep pouring our time and hearts into the show. But most importantly, 2Lt Todd Vandergraff wouldn’t be able to enjoy beer as a way to stay connected to home.

Thesis #24: Bombastic boasts—”We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ”—do not constitute a position.

This is the sort of “positioning” that you may sling in front of your investors…but your customers don’t give a crap.

Your customers, if they care about anything, it’s what you are committed to. At least one of the things you’re committed to should be them, at least in their mind.

Boastful “positioning” is about as valuable as a mission statement. Remember when Guy Kawasaki suggested that business ditch meaningless mission statements for meaningful mantras? The real reason the mantra was valuable was it gave businesses something to execute against.

Something to make decisions against.

Your “position”, should it be to “become the preeminent provider of XYZ”, says nothing to your customer about how you plan to make decisions, only where you plan to get with those decisions, even if it includes sacrificing them.

Today, I challenge you to drop your position for a set of core values.

A value system is a set of consistent ethic values (more specifically the personal and cultural values) and measures used for the purpose of ethical or ideological integrity…The first value category is Core Values, which prescribe the attitude and character of an organization…

In your business, your core values define how the members of your company will act and who and what are your priorities in order to attain desired goals for the business.